Light and Dark

by Natsume Sōseki

Book Overview

Light and Dark, Natsume Soseki's longest novel and masterpiece, although unfinished, is a minutely observed study of haute-bourgeois manners on the eve of World War I. It is also a psychological portrait of a new marriage that achieves a depth and exactitude of character revelation that had no precedent in Japan at the time of its publication and has not been equaled since. With Light and Dark, Soseki invented the modern Japanese novel.

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231161425
• ISBN13: 9780231161428
• Release Date: December 2013
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.2" x 9.1"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Amazing psychological analysis and composition method

This is the last and unfinished novel of his works. He died suddenly without finishing it. It is the story of the wife, who suspects if her husband loves another woman, and him, who can't forget a past lover. Abandoning his composition style of the individual narrater so far, he represents the different world views from each viewpoint of all the characters. The world of the characters are revealed as the panorama from the point of view of the God. The composition method of each plots proceeding contemporarily is just the modern method of the novel, so I can remember that surprise as if the completion of the Japanese modern novel sprang up under my eyes, the first time I read this novel. The Japanese contemporary novel has already begun at 'Light and Darkness.'This complicated composition method doesn't aim to lose the entertainment reading novels. Rather in reverse. It clarifies the various relationship among each people from their different viewpoints and digs out the psychology of each characters. It is psychological and historical at once. Each plots are the psychological analyses with the amazing insight and at the same time the preparation for the following ones.Readers may pierce the Dostyevskian in this novel. However, and more, they will be surprised at the complicated psychological structure of Japanese women. I have thought even now that there are no analyses of the Japanese culture superior to it. It is why the woman keeps the depth of their own culture in many cases.